The New French Connection

Tony Blair thinks he has a soul-mate in Nicolas Sarkozy. So does George W. Bush. Which is understandable. Anyone would be a relief after the Anglo-Saxon-hating Jacques Chirac, who considered it a major political triumph to embarrass the United States, and thought it amusing to dismiss the British as a country with inedible food, and that had made only one contribution to world agriculture: mad cow disease. This from the man who presided over the most inefficient system of agricultural subsidies and protectionism that could be devised by any bureaucrat or politician, with dire consequences for the world’s poorest farmers.